James Pochury
Following through on their 2026 commitment to localize the outcomes of COP30, the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) gathered partner organizations in a workshop in Colombo, Sri Lanka in June 2026 to discuss the establishment of a Regional Climate Stocktaking, Advocacy and Networking Centre. The workshop language was about stocktaking – ambition, evidence, comparative advantage, roster, framework.
The River Above Asia Oceania Ecclesial Network (RAOEN), through Pedro Walpole SJ, RAOEN Coordinator, joined the workshop and began his contribution with a small but telling admission. “I cannot speak for Indigenous People or for women,” he said, “but I am willing to share my experience and what I have learned with them.”
He spoke of communities exposed simultaneously to agribusiness expansion, land grabbing, and climate-driven droughts, floods, and landslides – pressures that data trackers can quantify.
But he also spoke of what data trackers cannot capture: a civil society that narrowed and polarized further in the last five years, a political climate where the words “advocacy” and “human rights” are increasingly heard as subversive rather than civic, and a corruption at the local level that deepens even as international attention to climate justice grows louder.
Then he turned to the youth. “The youth are of the greatest challenge to accompany with hope not because they lack awareness, but because awareness without the capacity to process what one is feeling produces exhaustion rather than action. Emotional intelligence… is part of the processing needed with the youth so they can personally balance their emotions and choose how best they can engage.”
There is no stocktaking framework currently in circulation that measures emotional intelligence. There is no advocacy center that tracks whether a young Indigenous organizer can hold grief and hope long enough to keep showing up.
And for those who spend time with climate-affected Indigenous communities, they would know that this capacity is what determines whether mobilization survives its third or fourth difficult year and not just the latest fossil-fuel data point.
Pedro’s reflections on women followed the same pattern. The most immediate impacts of ecological and economic stress, he noted, are the simple basics in many marginal communities: food security that is met daily or sometimes monthly through small gardens and informal economies, small livelihoods that use non-timber forest products such as plant oils and crafts, and the careful management of crop loans.
He observed that most women’s groups he accompanied lasted three to five years before dispersing. An exception is an upland Indigenous school, the Apu Palamguwan Cultural Education Center (APC) in Bendum, Bukidnon, Philippines that is continuously run by 25 Indigenous women teachers. What sustains APC’s efforts is not project funding, but an institutional commitment held in common over time and which a funding cycle cannot ensure.
He added that women are often the informal peace negotiators in contexts where armed presence is a daily reality and does not often appear in most program logframes. This reality does not fit neatly into an indicator and is part of the stories from the margins that need to be gathered and the learnings shared.
These stories are necessary parts and instruments of stocktaking, advocacy, and networking. The FABC centre to be set up is responding to a real and urgent need. The Church’s climate engagement across Asia needs exactly this kind of coordinated evidence base and advocacy capacity that this initiative intends to build.
In exploring collaboration, Pedro shared that the stronger link might be through parishes and dioceses. Caritas already holds both the institutional connection and the communications infrastructure that “reduces the opacity” between the Church and the realities its people are living.
A centre built to stocktake and advocate at a regional scale will only be as good as its capacity to receive what is happening at the community level where grief, hope, and emotional exhaustion are experienced, and where the parish, diocese, and gathering of women are learning to negotiate peace. The data gathered will be as honest as the relationships through which these are gathered.
This is the same recognition emerging in different forms from several ecclesial initiatives working across Asia and Oceania in recent years. The deep crisis facing the Church’s engagement with ecological and climate realities is not a shortage of data, frameworks, or advocacy capacity. It is a structural difficulty in receiving the forms of knowledge that data cannot hold – the read of a river held by an elder, the resilience of a women’s school sustained by conviction rather than funding, the emotional weight a young organizer is carrying this week.
The FABC stocktaking centre that builds the capacity to receive that knowledge, not as an anecdote or as added color to a report but as evidence with its own integrity, will be a genuinely new kind of institution.
James Pochury is RAOEN’s Regional Coordinator for South Asia.
The FABC meeting “From Voice to Action: Setting up of a Regional Climate Stocktaking, Advocacy, and Networking Centre” was held on 18 and 19 June 2026 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This meeting was in response to the endorsement on 5 March 2026 of the Joint Statement of the Office of Human Development (OHD)/Climate Change Desk (CCD) and the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs (OEIA), FABC: Localizing COP 30 Outcomes in Asia.
This followed from FABC’s participation in COP 30, and consultations with partners in its aftermath on a proposed action plan. A key post COP action that was endorsed was the establishment of a Regional Climate Stocktaking Advocacy, and Networking Centre to be hosted by Caritas Sri Lanka – SEDEC.